Google News alternatives that don't track you
Leaving Google News is easy. Leaving it for something that isn't the same trade in a different coat is harder. What to look for, what to ignore, and how to move your sources across.
Google News is genuinely good at its job. It is fast, it is free, it is already on your phone, and it is very good at guessing what you will click next. That last part is the reason people start looking for an alternative.
The problem is not that it shows you news. It is that reading the news through it is one more input into the profile that follows you everywhere else — the same identity that carries your searches, your location history and your YouTube habits. For a lot of people, the moment that clicks is the moment they start looking for the exit.
This piece is about finding an exit that is actually an exit, rather than the same arrangement in a different coat.
What you are actually leaving
Before comparing anything, it helps to be precise about what Google News does that you might miss.
Clustering. When forty outlets cover the same story, Google News groups them and offers "Full Coverage". This is the single most useful thing it does, and most alternatives simply do not have it.
Personalization. It learns from what you open, informed by a signed-in identity that already knows a great deal about you.
Breadth. An enormous index, including a lot of local coverage.
Zero friction. It is preinstalled, or one tap away.
Keep that list in mind while you read the rest — it is the checklist any replacement has to answer to.
The four kinds of alternative
RSS readers
The oldest answer and still the most robust. You choose the sources, the reader fetches their public feeds, and no algorithm sits in between. Nothing decides for you, which is both the appeal and the cost — you get exactly what you subscribed to, in the order it was published, including the days when your twelve sources all publish the same story.
Good if you already know which outlets you trust. Hard work if you do not.
Privacy-first aggregators
Apps that do the aggregating but keep the profile off their servers. This is the category worth looking at hardest, and also the one where claims need checking, because "privacy-first" is a marketing phrase before it is an architecture.
Publisher apps
One outlet, one app. Excellent depth, zero breadth, and you end up with ten of them.
The browser
Bookmarks and a few homepages. Free, private, and completely manual.
The four things that actually distinguish them
Marketing copy will not tell you these. The privacy policy and the store listing will.
1. Is there an account? If an app requires one before showing you anything, and it has no subscription and no social features, the account is there to make you measurable.
2. Where does personalization happen? On a server, your taste profile lives with the company and can be attached to an advertising identity. On the device, it is a file in the app's storage that dies when you delete the app.
3. What does the app itself receive? This is the question most people never ask. An app can have no account and still send every article you open back to its own servers. The only architecture that makes that impossible is one where the company has no server in the path — where the app talks to publishers directly.
4. How is it paid for? Contextual ads need no profile. Behavioral ads need one. Data licensing sells the behavior itself. A free app is being paid for somehow, and the answer is in the privacy policy under a heading like Advertising or Third parties.
Where GetMyNews fits
We built GetMyNews for exactly this migration, and it answers all four questions above the same way.
No account. No email, no password, no social login. Not a skippable step: the flow does not exist.
No GetMyNews server. The app reads publishers' public RSS feeds straight from your phone. There is no machine of ours that could record what you read, because there is no machine of ours between you and the publisher.
Personalization on the device. It learns from your swipes and reorders the deck. That model is a file in the app's own storage.
Clustering, which is the feature people actually miss. When several outlets cover the same story, GetMyNews groups them into one card and shows you who else is reporting it. It is the closest thing to "Full Coverage" outside Google News, and it is arguably more interesting here, because the outlets are spread across 22 countries rather than concentrated in one market.
1,200 feeds across 22 countries. By default you get the English-language ones — 359 feeds across 14 countries, including NPR, CNN, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CNBC and the Los Angeles Times. You can add any other country explicitly, and your phone's browser translates the page in one tap.
Free, one ad every twenty stories. That is the whole model. No subscription, no in-app purchase, nothing locked.
Curated, not crawled. Every one of those 1,200 feeds was chosen and checked. You get newsrooms, not an index of whatever the open web published in the last hour — which is why the deck stays readable instead of turning into a firehose.
The full detail of what the app touches, and how to switch off the advertising identifier system-wide, is in our privacy policy.
Moving your sources across
Whatever you land on, the migration is the same three steps.
1. Write down what you actually read. Open Google News, look at your "Following" list, and be ruthless. Most people find they read six outlets and follow forty.
2. Check those six are covered. In an RSS reader you add them by URL. In an aggregator, search the source list before committing.
3. Keep both for two weeks. The honest test is not the first day — it is whether you stop opening the old one. If after a fortnight you still reach for Google News every morning, the alternative is not working for you, and that is useful information rather than a failure.
The one thing worth deciding first
Do you want an algorithm or not?
If you want one, the question is only where it runs — on someone's server, attached to your identity, or on your phone, attached to nothing. That is a real choice and both answers are defensible.
If you do not want one at all, stop reading comparisons and set up an RSS reader. It will do exactly what you tell it, forever, and no article about alternatives will ever be relevant to you again.
Related reading: best news apps without an account for the checking method in detail, and why a news app shouldn't need your account for the argument underneath all of this.